WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2007-02-25 Time: 00:00:00 Posted By: Jan
February 23 2007 at 02:46PM
Being appointed as a cabinet minister in this impoverished country is like winning the lottery.
The Mercedes Benz vehicles are all top of the range E Class models, imported as part of ministerial pay packages which are very generous for a tiny, almost bankrupt kingdom without a viable economy.
If driving in them is fun, selling them is more so. The government of Prime Minister Pakhalita Mosisili allows ministers and senior civil servants to buy their official vehicles for ridiculously low prices: R4 000 for a Mercedes E Class and only R2 000 for a Toyota Camry used by senior civil servants.
They can, and do, resell them for enormous profits.
Politicians make such obscene profits
Tourism, Environment and Culture Minister Lebohang Nt’sinyi, for instance, paid just R4 000 for her Mercedes E240. Later it re-surfaced at a motor dealer in nearby Bloemfontein, South Africa, with a price tag of R256 000, representing a cool R252 000 profit for her without lifting a finger.
When Lesotho’s main weekly Public Eye newspaper splashed a front page story with a picture of the vehicle on display at the motor dealer last month under the headline “Cheap But Expensive”, Nt’sinyi was livid.
“If I sell vegetables at my home will you ask me about it?” she retorted after the newspaper quizzed her about her profiteering at the expense of taxpayers.
“The sale of my car is a personal matter,” she declared.
But is it really a private matter when politicians make such obscene profits at the expense of taxpayers and the donors who fund their impoverished country?
Perhaps the only country in the world with no daily paper
In another recent scam, cabinet ministers shamelessly awarded themselves an 84 percent salary hike despite an outcry from poorly paid civil servants and other workers.
An ordinary wage earner in Lesotho takes home a measly R650 a month, while a minister now earns more than R24 000 in addition to a free government house.
Other benefits include a death gratuity worth four times a minister’s annual salary, an annual interest-free loan of R550 000 and payment of unutilised leave at 50 percent of a minister’s monthly salary.
This pay package might sound unimpressive by Western or even South African standards. But not for such an impoverished country with an economy based mainly on water exports to South Africa and a textile industry slowly being killed by cheap Chinese competition.
Lesotho has one of the world’s highest Aids infection rates and unemployment. Most Basotho have no running water or sewerage, and access to electricity is the lowest of any southern African country.
As main opposition leader Tom Thabane succinctly puts it: “It’s hell on earth here… people are dying of hunger and disease while politicians feather their nests.”
Thabane, a minister who walked out of the cabinet three months ago to form his own party, the All Basotho Convention (ABC), claims he left because he could no longer stand the corruption among his peers. He speaks of the manipulation of major government contracts in favour of companies owned indirectly by those in high office or their friends.
He says he would not mind if these companies performed the jobs they were paid for. But he says most have failed to deliver acceptable work. Yet they keep on raking in government contracts.
Considering such incompetence, corruption and lack of delivery, one would expect African voters in countries like Lesotho to take advantage of elections to change their governments as swiftly as soiled nappies on a baby.
But after 10 years of “appalling service delivery” – as voter Lepekula Thabane put it – the Basotho still overwhelmingly re-elected Mosisili’s Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) in last week’s elections, giving it 61 of 80 contested parliamentary seats.
Does this suggest the Basotho voter is a fool? Why would he queue at the ballots, poor and hungry, only to vote back into office the architects of his misery?
Zimbabwe does the same. Even as Robert Mugabe’s insane rule continues to wreak havoc among his people, his ruling Zanu-PF party was this week winning a crucial by-election in an impoverished constituency.
What does this say of African voters? Are they afraid of change? Or just ignorant?
In countries like Lesotho, this seems to be so. And it is partly attributable to very weak civic institutions.
“Without strong media and other civic institutions to educate the populace, the majority of the people are not properly informed, engaged and seized about issues that affect them,” says Nqosa Mahao, a Lesotho national who is Dean of the Faculty of Law at a major South African university.
Lesotho’s communications are also among the patchiest in Africa. It is perhaps the only country in the world with no daily paper. Radio signals are mostly restricted to the capital Maseru. Without an informed citizenry, politicians can get away with anything.
Khabelo Motlasa, a prominent electoral analyst and Lesotho national, says the outcome of Saturday’s vote in his country suggests that Africans are often more influenced by personality cults than real issues.
“If you have a powerful personality, people tend to consider that personality more than issues,” he says.
And the odds seem forever stacked against African opposition parties. Seeing that Thabane’s party was pulling huge crowds to its rallies, Mosisili brought forward the elections by three months, leaving electoral authorities, by their own admission, with little time to register all voters. Thabane’s party was expected to appeal to younger people, many of whom would have been voting for the first time, but couldn’t because they had not registered in time.
Lesotho does deserve some credit for its anti-graft drive in the World Bank-funded Lesotho Highlands Water Project which collects the water that is exported, mainly to South Africa. The project’s former head, Ephraim Sole, is serving an 18-year jail sentence for taking R60-million worth of bribes from European and American companies bidding for contracts in the project.
Many of these firms have since been blacklisted by the World Bank from winning future contracts in its infrastructural development projects in poor countries.
But as Mahao said at a pre-election conference on Lesotho: “Corruption remains at the core of (the Lesotho) government. Sometimes it is subtle, sometimes brazen”.
Like Europeans, Africans simply ought to acquire the courage to change governments regularly and take a chance on the devil they don’t know rather than the ones who routinely rip them off. – Independent Foreign Service
Source: IOL
URL: http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&c…br>
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